University Course: Swinging Alphabet
Ivy League universities are getting a lot of recent play related to various protests, the latest involving students chaining themselves to a gate at Columbia University in protest of the detention of one of their own. You probably know the rest of the story, so I will go no further.
Columbia University was once one of the jewels of higher education in the United States. In bygone days, it was renowned for its School of Journalism. Now, journalism is dying, the “Who?, What?, When?, Where? and, Why?” of an event has long passed into mere commentary, depending entirely on the reporter’s point of view. Is there an objective reality? Note: It can be argued that even science may waffle on this, but we can address that if and when we consider the philosophy of pancakes.
Today, Columbia is in the news for its non-curricular activities. I am not referring to anything newsworthy about its collegiate sports programs such as they are, but to the fact that campus protests are now as abundant as they were in my college days. Back in my college days starting in the late 60s, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other activist organizations made Columbia an East Coast activist center as tumultuous as University California-Berkeley on the West Coast.
There is a second interim President at Columbia, after the President and first interim choice resigned amid the turmoil. News accounts suggest that student applications are falling off as students “pass” on attending Columbia. Even graduates are ripping up their diplomas; that would be the paper ones, which do not erase the fact that they may have graduated and obtained a degree from Columbia.
So, curious about this venerable institution and what it teaches about paper and virtual (this course should be as many are failing its application in real life), I decided to have a look at their philosophy offering for the Spring of 2025. I majored and did post-graduate work in philosophy so I felt it would be the best “discipline” for a quick look and review. One particular course caught my eye.
This course sounds like immense fun, but how it fits into what is commonly defined as philosophy, well, it looks more like finger painting in art coursework study of portraits and self-portraits than about the principles of philosophy and its various sub-categories, i.e., logic, metaphysics, epistemology, religion.
Next, I had a quick look at the philosophy course offerings of my alma mater, UCLA. Here are two I found curious, to say the least.
An entire 3-4 hours weekly on the contributions of philosophers of Latin American descent in the U.S. Why do those philosophers need singling out, if for no other reason than DEI (assumed everyone knows this acronym by now)? A survey of American philosophers of a given period of time, i.e., contemporary, 21st Century, etc., makes more sense and any American philosophers fitting those criteria would be eligible for inclusion from Asian to African American, and all sub-categories thereafter, based on merit.
Here is another course description from a UCLA philosophy class:
Under what premises or assumptions does a philosophy of race even exist? Is it epistemological, logical, metaphysical, or all three? I am not aware of any great thinkers even remotely related to this artificial category, except maybe Dr. Franz Fanon, who could also be called an African Nationalist just as easily. While one can make a case that there are ideas about race that could be cobbled together to form a “philosophy of racism”, again, this course could easily be wrapped up in a course on “Contemporary Philosophical Issues”. Again, the smell of DEI wafts into the virtual webpages of the catalogue my alma mater shares online.
Ayn Rand identified the fruits of these efforts, and they go beyond the latest manifestation known as DEI. In her 1965 essay, The Cashing-In: The Student “Rebellion” she said: “The basic epistemological-moral premise and pattern are the same: the obliteration of reason obliterates the concept of reality, which obliterates the concept of achievement, which obliterates the concept of the distinction between the earned and the unearned (italics hers).”
When tangential coursework at highly “reputable” universities becomes beholden to fads and touches nary the outer limits of the discipline in which they are offered, mission accomplished, the Age of Unreason is here. Maybe some consider that philosophy is a dead discipline. If it is pursued in this manner, and not as foundational to all knowledge, we get the “Swinging Alphabet”.
Oh, to return to the true mission of the university and the true value in obtaining a degree from: Teaching how to think!
